Corey Feldman Claims Johnny Depp Screwed Him out of 'Gilbert Grape' Role

I’m going to put my cards on the table: Is the point of this post to see if all the Johnny Depp bots have been switched to Justin Baldoni? Maybe! But, I also love me some old school Hollywood back-biting.

Anyway, while making an appearance on Billy Corgan’s podcast, Corey Feldman claimed there’s an alternate universe where he played the role of Arnie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? instead of Leonardo DiCaprio. According to Feldman, he was already cast and ready to go until Depp signed on. That’s when things went south.

Via EW:

“Did they push you out?” Corgan asked.

“Johnny Depp,” Feldman said, nodding. “He was cast after I was, and apparently whispered into the producers’ ear that he wasn’t fond of me, and thought — he said that I was a junkie and that he didn’t work with junkies. And this is the first time I’ve ever telling this story, so I’m sure I’m gonna get hung by this one.”

If you have any familiarity at all with Depp, you know this reasoning, if true, is some supreme bullsh*t, and Feldman made it a point to note as much.

“I was sober. I had just gotten sober,” Feldman said. “I had just gotten out of rehab. I had turned my life around, and, in fact, was trying to help River [Phoenix] at the time, who [Depp] was running with at the time, as we all know.”

Did any of this happen? Who’s to say? It sounds believable until Feldman opened up about another role he supposedly lost to Leo, and even though he tempers this claim a bit, I would not have chosen it as a closing argument. You’re gonna lose the jury on this one.

“Ironically, just a couple years later, I also was up for Titanic, so there was kind of a double banger with Leo,” Feldman told Corgan. “But that was okay, because that one I wasn’t as close. I was up for it, I read for it, I know that I was in the contention somewhere.”

What was Corey Feldman’s career like around the time that James Cameron would have been casting Titanic? His biggest roles were voicing Donatello in the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies and starring in Tales of the Crypt: Bordello of Blood with Dennis Miller. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my Epsom salt bath because I’m old enough to remember when that movie constantly ran on TV. You couldn’t escape it.